Note: This cartridge's settings do not allow embedded playback. A [Play at lexaloffle] link will be included instead.

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Steve Johanson has disappeared and his girlfriend Sally Franklin has hired your detective agency to locate him. Even before you get on the scene there are signs that maybe this isn't just a simple missing persons case. Can you crack it? Explore Anteform Valley and its settlements, talk to its residents, search desks and files, and build up your skills as you collect clues to figure out what really happened to Steve and maybe even prevent it from happening again.

This is a weird detective story RPG in the style of the old-school 8-bit Ultima games as they were found on the C128. I hope you enjoy it.

It exhausts many of the resources available to a PICO-8 app, and required minimization before it could be converted into a cartridge (in fact this version fits with just one byte to spare). The full source of Anteform is available on GitHub for anyone interested in how it works. I have also provided a manual for it in a couple of formats, so you may want to grab and peruse the Anteform manual as a PDF or the Anteform manual as an ePub as well as the cartridge itself. Downloadable binaries are also available on the Itch.io Anteform page.

If you have any comments, questions, or even just random thoughts related to it, I'll be happy to listen. As this is a mystery story though please be mindful of ruining the fun for others and avoid posting spoilers. I have played all the way through and do not know of any bugs in this version (1.0) but I could have easily missed some.

This game was built using the Minima Engine, and if you like it you may like Minima (play online or download) as well. Both use the same interface and share some of the same graphics but have completely different stories, settings, and characters. They're also different genres played at a different scale. Minima is a traditional RPG set on a full world with castles and towns; this game is set in Anteform Valley with villages and individual buildings. This game places more emphasis on finding clues either by talking with people or searching through things. There's no magic in it, but it is in the weird mystery genre and so things aren't quite what they appear in the beginning, either...